Justin Trudeau enforces his own values test

Prime Minister Trudeau answers questions during a town hall in Winnipeg. January 31, 2018. /// Le premier ministre Trudeau répond à des questions durant une assemblée publique à Winnipeg. 31 janvier 2018.

Do you remember when Justin Trudeau didn’t believe in Canadian values?

When Conservative MP Kellie Leitch suggested a values test for people wanting to immigrate to Canada she was roundly denounced by the prime minister and many others. Trudeau wanted nothing to do with so-called “Canadian Values.”

Trudeau famously told the New York Times Magazine that Canada had no real identity.

“There is no core identity, no mainstream in Canada,” he claimed. “There are shared values — openness, respect, compassion, willingness to work hard, to be there for each other, to search for equality and justice. Those qualities are what make us the first postnational state.”

That is Trudeau, values when it suits him, like using government funds and rules to force his views on abortion onto groups that have been partners with the government for years. This year, Trudeau announced that no funds would go to groups against abortion.

He later revised that and said no group with a core mandate to oppose abortion could get money but other church groups or the like running summer camps could get money. Problem is, those groups were asked to go against their core principles in order to get the money.

Here is the attestation groups must sign off on.

Both the job and the organization’s core mandate respect individual human rights in Canada, including the values underlying the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms as well as other rights. These include reproductive rights, and the right to be free from discrimination on the basis of sex, religion, race, national or ethnic origin, colour, mental or physical disability, sexual orientation, or gender identity or expression.

The result has been a huge increase in the number of rejected applications as reported by Brian Platt in National Post.

In 2017, the government received 41,961 applications for Canada Summer Jobs. Of those, 199 were later withdrawn by the employer and 126 files were rejected for problems with the application, leaving 41,716 eligible applications.

This year, with the new attestation, the government received 42,647 applications. Fifty-five were withdrawn, but 1,561 were rejected — suggesting that more than 1,400 applications were rejected for protesting the attestation.

Those figures don’t include groups like the one I was speaking to yesterday that had sent in their application the old-fashioned way, on paper, and just received notice by mail that if they did not return the application with the attestation signed they would be rejected.

This is a Catholic organization run by volunteers that helps some of the poorest families in Ottawa. For years they have fundraised money for their core mandate and been helped with funding to hire up to four summer students to help the least fortunate.

This group can’t in good conscience say they agree with abortion but in Justin Trudeau’s Canada, everyone must agree with his values, or else.

Watch me describe this via Facebook Live at the opening of my radio show last night.

5 Comments

  1. We still don’t know all of what the values test says. The Tories have never posted it anywhere, and they don’t put it on You Tube.

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